The history of California’s ‘Kill Bill’ church

When Oscar Castañeda opened his church’s doors at the end of 2002, he didn’t expect thousands of uninvited guests to show up.

Sanctuary Adventist Church sits in an area that Castañeda describes as “the middle of nowhere”: a dusty, Joshua Tree-strewn stretch of California’s Mojave Desert. The church falls just outside the city of Lancaster, in an area called Hi Vista. Empty stretches of shrub-lined roads are intermittently punctuated by clusters of low-slung houses. 

On a recent visit, the facade’s off-white paint was peeling, and a flimsy barbed-wire fence stood in front of the church.

Castañeda, who works as a pastor, moved to the California desert 37 years ago. For years after his arrival, he said the same image appeared in his dreams: a desert church with a pale, Spanish-style facade.

One day, he made a wrong turn while driving down an unfamiliar stretch of desert road. Before he knew it, he wound up face to face with the church of his dreams. “This is the church,” he told his wife later. “I’ve been dreaming about it.”

Castañeda purchased the building, established a Seventh Day Adventist congregation and began holding services every Saturday. (Seventh Day Adventists observe a Sabbath.) He felt that he had benefited from a miracle, or at least a stroke of real estate luck.

There was only one problem: Strangers would regularly appear outside of his church, make a commotion and take pictures of the building. And they didn’t seem like the religious type.

A year or so before Castañeda took over the church, Hollywood location scout Doug Dresser experienced a miracle on the same spot — albeit a comparatively minor one.

Dresser was working as a location scout for Quentin Tarantino’s newest film, a four-hour revenge tale called “Kill Bill.” (The studio would later insist that the film be split into two volumes, each approximately two hours long.) The film’s script called for a wedding chapel in a Texas town in “the middle of nowhere” next to a desert crossroads.

This was before the time of Google Maps, so Dresser and his team scanned paper maps, trying to find patches of desert around the country where they might find a church that fit the bill.

“We looked at probably 10 or 20 churches,” Dresser told SFGATE.

One fateful day, Dresser sent an associate to drive through the outer Lancaster area, on the off chance that the right church might present itself. The associate stumbled upon the church, “sitting right there, just waiting for us,” Dresser said.

“Sometimes when you’re scouting, you’re providing options, and then you see something like that and you just know,” Dresser said.

If the “Kill Bill” team thought that Sanctuary church was a perfect film location, it’s for a good reason: It was designed as one.

When the building was constructed in the early 20th century, it was, in Castañeda’s words, “just a box.” But around 1980, production designers for the Robert DeNiro film “True Confessions” turned it into a church, adding its iconic facade and windows. 

The box became a fake church, and the fake church became a real one. After the film crew left, religious congregations began renting out the building. First a Catholic church, then Pentecostal, then Baptist, and so on, Castañeda said. When the “Kill Bill” film crew came around, they didn’t know anything about its Hollywood history. They just assumed that the building was a regular church. After all, it was operating like one.

When it was the “Kill Bill” team’s turn to adapt the church, the effort cost tens of thousands of dollars. The production enlisted the help of nearly 100 set designers, painters and construction workers, who painstakingly remodeled the building, stripping out the church’s blue shag carpet, gutting its interior and laying wooden planking on the floor. They built a porch and redesigned the front door.

After one or two months of intensive renovation, the church, newly Westernized as the “Two Pines Wedding Chapel,” was ready for action. It would go on to be the site of the infamous “Kill Bill” wedding massacre scene, the backdrop upon which a team of assassins would slaughter an entire wedding party — except for the Bride, who survived and went on a quest to take her revenge. 

The scenes were filmed in mid-2002, months before Castañeda took over the building.

Castañeda knew none of this when he established Sanctuary Adventist Church. But after two years of mysterious visitors taking photographs outside his church, he finally worked up the courage to approach one of them. His question was simple: “Why are you doing this?” 

She told him about a movie called “Kill Bill,” which was released in October 2003.

Castañeda isn’t a big film fan, he said. Especially violent films. But after enough visitors mentioned “Kill Bill” to him, curiosity got the best of him. He borrowed both volumes from the library and watched them.

In the black-and-white wedding chapel massacre scene (featuring a Samuel L. Jackson cameo as the organist) the Bride and her wedding party stand inside Castañeda’s desert church, preparing to rehearse the ceremony. Outside, four figures dressed in black approach, holding huge guns: the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. They march cooly through church’s doors. 

“What the hell?” the officiant exclaims. Wedding guests scream and run to the back of the church. Without a word, the Vipers fan out and let loose a volley of bullets. Then, silence.

“It looked OK for me,” Castañeda said of “Kill Bill,” nonchalantly, noting that the film was “very violent.”

Since Castañeda established his church, he said Hollywood location scouts occasionally show up at his doorstep to ask him to use it. His answer was always the same. “I didn’t have the intention to do any business with Hollywood,” he told SFGATE. He was worried about his church being used to produce violent or pornographic material. 

In short, he was worried about “another ‘Kill Bill.’”

But eventually, he began to embrace the church’s cinematic potential — sort of. After he rejected enough scouts’ advances, a representative from LA County’s film office paid him a visit. She convinced him to allow films to shoot at the church, reasoning that he could vet their contents first and refuse any that offended his sensibilities.

Castañeda struck up a relationship with Hollywood that was fruitful, if uneasy, including shooting “Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles” there, as well as several music videos.

Castañeda can rattle off the list of every film ever shot at the church, including those before his time, Britney Spears’ “Crossroads” and “Inferno” among them. In the 1980s, the church appears as the opening shot for the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” music video but would ultimately prove mild for other musical moments shot in Hi Vista. 

Cardi B’s music video for “Be Careful” was filmed at the church, and Castañeda appears as the father officiating a wedding. He calls his participation in the music video “my biggest regret,” and said that he would never have allowed Cardi B’s team to use the church if he had known that her music was “very vulgar.”

Eventually, Castañeda set up a website to advertise the church for tours and weddings, as well as a location for commercials and music videos. He said he has married people from England, France, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Croatia and Mexico. Some Tarantino pilgrims even lay down on the floor where Uma Thurman’s character was left to die to recreate the iconic scene. 

According to Castañeda’s guest book, which started in 2004, the church has welcomed more than 12,000 visitors.

Today, a framed list of the Ten Commandments hangs in the window next to Sanctuary Adventist Church’s front door. Directly to the right of the frame, a bright yellow sign beckons behind the glass: “FILM HERE.” 

For now, at least, Castañeda settled on an uneasy equilibrium between Sanctuary Adventist Church and Two Pines Wedding Chapel. Or, to put a finer point on it, between “Thou shalt not kill” and “Kill Bill.”